I always make it a point to enjoy and explore things of yesteryear, ranging from studying old spiritual concepts to renting movies made well before I was born. And I've been in heaven since the distribution of arcade emulators, like MAME and Raine, making all the games I grew up with accessible.

There have been legal arguments over it - and this isn't the place to discuss it - but the fact is that there is literally no other place to play classics like Black Widow, Berzerk or - if you really wanted to play it - Journey.

One game that I regularly forget about, play again, and fall in love with is Williams' Joust. For those not familiar, Joust is a classic side-view combat game in which players fly on ostrich-like creatures and try to knock each other off their birds. Lucky for us Joust is available on most platforms, including PC, Mac and Playstation.

The beauty of Joust isn't in its graphics, which were pretty good for the early '80s, nor it being equally fun in one or two player modes. The beauty is that everything - and I do mean everything - in the game is focused.

The whole game takes place on one single game screen that doesn't scroll and barely changes from level to level. There is no music to hear during the game, just the flapping of bird wings and other sparse sound effects. Even more interesting, though, is that the game joystick only goes left and right, and there is only one button. There is absolutely no excess.

Despite these "limitations," however, Joust is more complete than some games created with 1000 times the budget and 20 times the technology. As one reviewer put it, Joust's designer John Newcomer created a whole universe in one, single screen.

Just like in 1982, the year Joust was made, we as independent game developers must work with small teams and limited resources. The difference is that we are inundated with beautiful Silicon Graphics-quality art, game control schemes with eight buttons and two joysticks, and piles and piles of game design options (online play, cut scenes, voice technology, etc.).

Some of these options, of course, aren't really options for us. That doesn't mean, however, that we don't feel the pressure to add this function or make another feature in the game when these extra elements aren't necessary or beneficial to the game. Then, like too much ice in a soda, the original, perhaps brilliant game concept is diluted with half-baked additions and tacked-on ideas. The flavor is lost.

I can't count how many times I personally have had to pull my own reigns in and figure out what was best for my game and what was just "fluff." It's heartbreaking to spend a great deal of time on a game aspect, just to realize that it hurts the game more than it helps it.

However, imagine Space Invaders with four buttons or Pac-Man with a machine gun - not quite the same. You can bet, though, that the developer or developers debated over what the game was going to be and, once they determined that, they had the heart to discard anything that didn't fit into their vision.

In the end, not only did they give us a classic game, but a game with complete and undiluted focus.

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Written by Damon Brown.